GE makes digital and IoT push in Europe

GE is spearheading its industrial IoT operations by hiring new staff and by opening a new office in Europe.

GE’s ‘Digital Foundry’ is based in Paris, France and is the first of a range of new digital centres the firm is opening this year.

Employment boost for GE

Based in the historic Le Centorial building, it’ll incubate start-ups, improve collaboration and drive IoT ecosystem growth. There will also be resources and employees on hand to work with customers on developing new applications.

250 jobs will be created in the process. New employees will be working in areas such as engineering, data science, user experience and design thinking, with the aim of expanding GE’s digital presence in Europe.

Honing its industrial IoT platform

They’ll also work on building Predix, GE’s platform for the industrial internet. Opened to customers in February, almost 17,000 developers right around the world are already working on growing the platform.

According to recent studies, digitising products and services can add up to 110 billion Euros to the European economy. GE wants to fuel this with its very own products, including Digital Power Plant. The latter helps nations reduce gas emissions.

With coal plants generating 40 percent of the world’s electricity, GE claims that its product can reduce their emissions by 3 percent and fuel consumption by 67,000 tons of coal annually.

Big insights and healthcare focus

The firm has also announced it’s bringing its Brilliant Manufacturing suite to Predix, which will let users gather, collect and analyse data from all aspects of production. They’ll be able to use these insights to meet production targets and control costs. Rollout is planned for Q3 2016.

Healthcare is another focus for GE. In the UK, it’s launched a solution called GE Health Cloud, a cloud ecosystem that connects to software, hardware and analytics across medical pathways and teams.

Rill Ruh, CEO of GE Digital, said: “The digitization of industry in Europe requires not only leadership and investment from companies such as GE and our partners – but also more collaboration between the private and public sector.

“We are building an open platform, where GE’s 14,000 developers can collaborate with our customers and partners to create new applications.

Supporting start-ups

GE is also partnering with NUMA, which is Frances’s first start-up accelerator. Both organisations will be working together to identify and grow innovative ideas and start-ups in the country

Marie-Vorgan Le Barzic, CEO of NUMA, said: “Having GE’s European foundry’s headquarter in Paris is a great opportunity, and we will closely work with GE Digital to create and structure an innovation ecosystem around the Industrial Internet.

“We are confident that we can build a strong community of startups, data scientists, developers and software experts to find solutions to complex industrial challenges.”